


Summer

by vtn



Category: Heroes - Fandom
Genre: Depression, Incest, Multi, Polyamory, Sibling Incest, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-04-26
Updated: 2007-04-26
Packaged: 2017-11-17 15:59:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/553320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vtn/pseuds/vtn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nathan and Peter, through five summers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Summer

**Summer, 1993.** New York summer and rather than playing baseball (the Jets, the Mets—what did it even matter, Peter wondered), Peter scribbled his memoirs into notebooks and on one laziest of days asked his big brother (visiting from law school) hesitantly "about girls and stuff?"

"Oh, there's not much to it," Nathan said, grinning cockily.  "Mostly you just have to flirt with her and make her feel beautiful and then if she grabs your hand and puts it in her pants you have to keep making sure she feels okay."

"What about kissing?  What's the right way to kiss a girl?"  Nathan's eyebrows went up.

"What, do you want me to—?"

"Yes," Peter said, putting his hands on top of Nathan's.

"Well, I can't.  That wouldn't be—"

"Come on.  I just want to know.  You can show me."

Peter, his hands and face burning, let Nathan's hands question where to sit—Peter's shoulders, Peter's back, Peter's hair?  And then Nathan's lips on his, but that wasn't the way Peter thought you were supposed to kiss girls at all.  It wasn't supposed to be this…sad.

So he let Nathan strip his shirt off and then Nathan's own, and standing there in the shadowy hall he felt ashamed of his scrawny chest next to Nathan's muscles.  But it was also kind of like the way he felt when—

"Can I kiss you again, Nathan?"

"Shh."  No, Nathan shouldn't be crying.  Not his big brother.  So he closed his eyes this time.

**Summer, 1995.** "Nathan?" Peter looks up from a _Fantastic Four_ and follows the trail of his brother's shadow until he can see his face.  "Nathan!  You're home!"

"Hey, Peter."  Nathan ruffles Peter's hair before crouching on the floor next to him.  "Where is everyone?"

"Mom's grocery shopping and Dad's at work.  The usual."  Peter rolls his eyes. 

"Oh, are they."  A smile twists the corners of Nathan's mouth.  "Well, we could play chess or something till they get here."

"Chess."  Peter bites his lip and looks levelly at Nathan.  "Right.  Chess."

"Sure, why not?  It's a good—you know, brother-brother bonding thing."  Peter keeps staring his brother down, but Nathan's face betrays nothing.  Wordlessly, Peter yanks him into the pantry by the cuff of his sleeve.  He shakes his head at Nathan, incredulous.

"Seriously.  Chess!"

He ends up blowing Nathan in the pantry, eyes closed and hands hooked behind Nathan's knees.  He's determined to make Nathan love this, and judging by the sounds and the profane declarations Nathan is making, Nathan loves this.  Peter realizes he's probably going to come in his pants before he's even done. 

Light floods into the pantry, a line of it falling over Nathan's eye and oh shit oh fuck oh God it's their mother and they didn't hear her come in and oh God she's seen.  But then she's closing the door again and Peter doesn't say anything, just lets his mind reel and his body respond and Nathan's hand grip tight in his hair.

 

 **Summer, 1996.** Peter calls it his 'lost summer' now, but it's called clinical depression.  For Peter it meant pinning black and navy T-shirts up over his windows and powering up the family's computer so he could type out reams of meaningful nonsense about how much it hurt to go out into the world and how he was a better person for shying away from the sun.

He was never stupid; you had to give him that.  The days when Nathan would come home and 'talk to Mom and Dad about work', Peter would lean against the air vent in the floor and listen.

"Nathan," Mrs. Petrelli would say, "He's been skipping classes.  I don't know where he's going.  He could be doing drugs.  You need to go up there and talk some sense into him."

"I wouldn't worry so much.  Look, he's a smart kid, he can take care of himself.  I think we're both kidding ourselves if we can't just look at the facts."

(What facts? Peter would ask himself.  He wouldn't find out the answer until years later.)

"I still think you should go talk to him."

"All right.  I will."

So just like every other time they 'talked', Peter would seal the door off with more shirts and strip off his own shirt and socks, leaning back on the bed to let Nathan unbutton his jeans. 

"Nathan, make me forget," he'd plead.  "I can't take this."  Nathan would nod curtly before undressing.

And then—oh—he made Peter forget.

 

 **Summer, 2000.**   Nathan has a girlfriend.  Her name is Heidi.  Peter knows this, as well as everything else about her, because after too many martinis (they both giggled when Peter started ordering them 'shaken, not stirred', and it kept being funny even after four repeats) she's spilling her guts to him in her hotel room.  She loves Nathan more than chocolate, more than square dancing, more than REM. 

Another thing she loves is Peter's laugh and, apparently, his hands, because she can't stop kneading them, not even when Peter has to wrench them out of her grip to help her reach the zipper of her tight black dress. 

"I just wish he could stop being so serious lately," she exhales as Peter massages her smooth shoulders. 

"Oh, he has his moments."  Peter smiles into the back of her neck. 

Here's something else Heidi loves: cuddling after sex, nuzzling Peter while he still moves inside her until he's completely limp. 

"He's going to propose to me," she says softly, her eyes wide and pupils round.  "I love him so much."

"So do I," Peter murmurs. 

Yes, Nathan has a girlfriend, and soon Nathan has a fiancée, a fiancée who knows what 'don't tell _anyone_ ' means in regards to the way her body fits perfectly between Nathan's and Peter's, the way it makes her hot when Nathan and Peter kiss frantically against the bathroom mirror, the way she likes Peter's jokes but Nathan's cologne; Nathan's eyes but Peter's lips.

Luckily, she can have both.

 

 **Summer, 2006.**   Here is a family with a hole: their father is gone.

Here is a quiet house, a still house, a house that has secrets.  Here is the room where a boy used to sit and dream of changing the world before going downstairs to tell his baby brother stories about high school and ask him for gap-toothed opinions on the Dow Jones.  Here is the brother's room; here the window where he waited for the boy to come home.

Here is the wife of the deceased.  You'd think her bones are held together by bits of string.  She has secrets, too.  She knows her husband was depressed.  She knows Peter was the same.  She knows Nathan has been, too.  She knows about that time in the pantry (and that other time behind the shed, and that other time, and…).  She knows her grandson Monty has Peter's nose.  She knows something about a fifteen-year-old girl in Texas.  She knows her sons are not ordinary boys; that they're meant for something larger.

She knows a lot of things.

Here is the older brother in his huge house, his answering machine calling to him, ignored.  Here are his sons, who will never (he hopes) have to deal with what he and his brother did.

Here is the younger brother at the hospital.  His hand is in Charles' hand, Charles who needs him more than his own grieving family does. 

"Do you believe in heaven?" Charles asks him.

Here he hesitates.  Here he nods.

**Author's Note:**

> I took this story down during Strikethrough; now it's back! 
> 
> I'm pretty sure that headcanon about Mama Petrelli in part 5 was a _terrible_ idea.


End file.
